Could someone please feed us?

I have been enjoying the dance of Capital and Demand (read us, THE PEOPLE, the people that buy the Snickers Bar and hence create the demand for Snickers) in the nutritional arena lately. Nestle, the world’s biggest food company, is changing the way they do business. Rather than maintaining Nestle’s role as a seller of cheap commoditys (Nescafe, etc…) the corporate giant is regearing its marketing focus to expand its functional food production. A study by the Harvard Business School found that between 2004 and 2007, sales of Nestles products such “functional ingredients grew by 23.7% a year, compared with growth of 6.2% a year for its ordinary foods.” (The Economist, October 31-novemer 6, 2009) Milk chocolate that is good for you…

Heck, ya, people will buy it.

I’m not sure that supplements will ever take the place of real vegetables, for example, and can never fully reproduce the benefits of the real nutrient.

No single nutrient creates heath. The human condition is an arrayment of nutrients, salts and minerals. Take vitamin D for example.

Vitamin D, which the human body receives through the skin from the sun, can be transformed into pills that one could swallow, but “only give you the right amount–but not generate the photo products that real sunlight has.” (Dr. Ben Kim, http://drbenkim.com/vitamin-d-facts.htm) It seems that no amount of ingestion can fully match the vitamins that our sun beams down upon us.

Vitamin D appears to be one of the most important nutrients to prevent disease. A nutrient largely missing from our diet. A few facts from Dr. Michael Holick’s book, The UV Advantage (http://www.bricktowerpress.com/Health/978-1-596879-00-3.html):

76% of pregenant women are deficient in vitamin D

60% of hospitalized people are deficient

80% of nursing home folks are vitamin D deficient

There is a ripeness the sun imbues. There is a richness, a tawny richness, but I guess that I am just old fashioned and believe everything made natural from scratch is the best. Real vegetables and real sunlight….